Living Room Project

I just added the "before" pics of our living room to our photo album, if anyone is interested!

If you are wondering why we have already arranged the furniture differently before we started to paint is because my husband is a geek. We have a home theater system and he needed to make sure the new furniture arrangement was going to work with speaker placement!d

Grabert Demolition

Tonight starts a process that will probably take a month or two to complete, updating 2 of the "worst rooms" in our house. To give you a little bit of a back story on our house:

Our house has 2 bedrooms, two full baths, a living room, an entry way and a kitchen with dining room attached. Every room has a problem with the paint, the two biggest offenders being the guest bedroom and the living room. Every wall in the house is covered in texture, texture that was not applied right and needs to be completely redone. This is some what of an involved process, we need to sand everything off of the walls down to the drywall. After getting the walls smooth, we'll prime the walls and depending on what the walls look like after sanding, possibly texture the walls and then (FINALLY!) paint.

The guest bedroom project started last summer. Forest and our friend Bryce tried to blend the uneven texture, but it was pretty much impossible to do. They also didn't realize that the previous owners painted right over the wallpaper! That absolutely needs to be removed. After that is done, we'll clean up the giant mess it will make, then move all of the furniture from the living room into the guest bedroom. Then we'll do the same thing in the living room. The texture isn't as thick, but the room is about 25X15 and has 12 foot ceilings! We are also going to replace every door frame and the baseboards. Home Depot has these nifty miter-less door frame kits that actually aren't any more expensive then doing it the old fashion way, and they fit right into my decor! Between the entry way and living room, we have 9 doorways. 6 of them are in the entry way! After we get the living room painted, we're going to move all of the furniture back into the living room. We'll then paint the guest bedroom and then install laminate flooring in the entry way and guest bedroom.

I know, it sounds like an insane amount of work. It kind of is, but thankfully we have a good idea of what we are doing now. Forest's major concern in this project? Where we were going to put the speakers for our Home Theater when we arrange the furniture. Since we are installing new baseboards and door frames, it will finally be easy to hide the wires somewhere other than under our rug. The TV is blocking the fireplace at the moment and when this is all done, I'll actually be able to show it off! I won't EVER use it (I live in Texas, after all!) but for some reason everyone loves having them down here.

The only problem I am worried about at the moment is color. Colors for the guest bedroom have been picked out for almost a year now (I know, sad right?) but Forest and I are debating for the living room. I want to do a beige color with country red trim, something very prim. He, for some reason, thinks the trim should be white, which is of course, very boring. So, I'm asking for ideas!

I am super excited about this project. It'll be a HUGE under taking but I am willing to deal with a few weeks of madness to finally update that living room. I'll post pictures as we get the project started!

Spare Oom

Our guest bedroom/workspace is affectionately called "Spare Oom". If you get that reference, I bet you are smiling! It's the smallest room besides the bathrooms and it probably needs the most work. The carpet has things melted into it and is pink in spots. The walls are smooth in some places and textured in others. The ceiling looks like a child had some fun with cottage cheese. It's just a really bad room. All of that is going to change! I'm planning a major overhaul.

First, the floors. We are going to install laminate flooring. The type I picked out is gorgeous and looks just like real wood. The color is amazing. This will also be installed in our front "foyer" area. I would love to have this put in my entire house because of our allergies, but I think we may just do our bedroom eventually. You kind of need carpet in the front room...

The walls are in okay shape, just need a new coat of paint. We are replacing the baseboards and door frames. The window doesn't have a frame, but we may install one. We decided on Behr paint (they have $5 off each gallon for memorial day, score!). The walls are going to be "Promenade", which is a sagey-green and the trim is going to be "Warm Muffin", a pale yellow. Lastly, the door (which will also be new) is going to be "Polar Bear", which just looks like white to me, but I like the name! Alexa said "Polar Bears are promenading while eating warm muffins". I wish I could name paint colors. Whoever has that job is awesome.

The closet currently has no doors, but I don't think we'll replace them right away. I am going to wait for them to go on sale. The ones I want are the mirror sliding doors. They aren't anymore expensive than the normal sliding doors, so I figured the mirrors would look really nice.

Lastly, we bought almost all new furniture for this room. Generally, it won't have a bed in it. Last year right before we closed on the house, we got a great deal on a fantastic queen sized air mattress. It's 25 inches tall and really comfy. Even my parents slept on it and thought it was great. This saves us a lot of room when we're not using the bed. My sister directed me to a great website that has all real-wood furniture for a great price. They had a special going on, so I ended up getting something for free. I bought an armoire, a nightstand and a cute little bench. I found a desk at Target for my computer.

The other thing we're doing is replacing all of our entry doors. They are all in pretty terrible shape and are rather inefficient. We're getting our new windows installed in two-three weeks, so what is the point if our doors are leaking too?

My only problem right now with all of this is - what color do I paint my front and back doors? I want to paint them blue (the guy at Home Depot even suggested blue!) and Forest is saying we should just paint them white. White is boring! Anyone have any suggestions?

So, we are going to be insanely busy coming up here, and apparently very poor too! After this project is done, I am going to be resting for a while. I think my dear husband can only take so much of this!

July 8th

I can't believe it's been 16 months since I have been to Michigan. I thankfully have been able to see my parents since then, but I miss my sister (and occasionally my brother!). Crystal and I are both planning trips there for the summer. I went back and forth between driving and flying and with how many miles are on our cars, flying won. Due to some heavy financial "burdens" we've had lately (I will talk about that later), we decided that I would go alone this time. I bought my ticket from DFW to DTW, but I haven't booked my flight home yet. The flight there has a lay-over in St. Louis of all places (an airport I am NOT fond of, but I will deal). I'm still debating on what airline to take and it wasn't any cheaper to book it round trip either way I went. I'm being a cheapskate because I don't want to pay a single cent more in fees for anything. These luggage fees are just insane considering I'm paying nearly $75 more for this ticket than I normally would. I pre-packed to make sure I could fit all of my clothes into my carry-on luggage and I managed to fit it all. On the way home, however, I may fly Southwest so I can check a bag for free. I'm going to pack a duffel bag flat in my carry-on and stuff it full of my clothes for the trip home. I'll check that and bring anything I buy home with me in my carry-on. It saves me money and the flight home is non-stop. So, I definitely leave for Detroit on July 8th and I'm pretty sure I am coming home on July 22nd (but at 6:30 in the morning).

As for the financial "burden" I was talking about, we just bought new windows. I cannot wait until they are installed because looking out of my old ones makes me depressed! We went with top-of-the-line windows that are eco-friendly and all of that. They are double hung, including the huge picture window in our kitchen, so they will be a breeze to clean. None of our windows currently have screens either, so it will be so nice to be able to open them (which will probably be in the fall, as it's in the 90's here already). Our electricity bill will be pleasant to receive those first few months too. This is the first big project we've started in the house. It's hard to believe we closed a year ago!

Things are good around here, we've been keeping very busy. My calling keeps me on my toes, I once spent 6 straight hours on my computer e-mailing, making bulletin posts, organizing our calendar year for the Ward. It's great, I love it! I'm not being sarcastic either, I really do enjoy this. I used to spend whole weekends organizing my room. I wish I were that motivated about things now in my house...at least I can be with my calling.

sprucing things up

We have had a very busy few weeks, getting things cleaned up and fixed up around here. I have a list of plans a mile long and I have no idea where to start. Forest keeps telling me "one at a time..." but I don't have any clue of which one to do first!

We have made great progress with our landscaping. We built a pathway from our gate to our deck, planted two square foot gardens and have a lovely flower bed along the house with great lighting for when we entertain outside. Our front yard needs a bit of work, we're going to lay out a new flower bed in the front. My pansies are still looking great from the winter, at least the ones that have survived the torrential downpours and hail storms. I think it's finally time to install gutters. I think we will end up doing them ourselves, unless anyone in DFW knows of a great company that can do them for us!

In other news, we celebrated our 5th anniversary last Friday. It's hard to believe that it's been 5 years already! We have had good times and sad, thankfully more good times than not. Forest surprised me with a gorgeous ring. My wedding ring is wonderful and I love it, but it's not practical for work. It also has an interlocking band, so I wasn't able to just wear the band either. I let him know what I wanted and we found one together. It's just perfect, like my dear husband :)